Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

> As far as anyone could understand, the proposed CMG system wasn't listening through a phone's microphone 24/7, instead it was using those small slivers of voice data that are recorded and uploaded to the cloud in the moments after you activate your voice assistant with a "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri" command.

That's not quite accurate. The CMG thing was very clearly a case of advertising sales people getting over-excited and thinking they could sell vaporware to customers who had bought into the common "your phone listens to you and serves you ads" conspiracy theory. They cut that out the moment it started attracting attention from outside of their potential marks. Here's a rant about that I originally posted as a series of comments elsewhere: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/2/facebook-cmg/

The "Hey Google" / "Hey Siri" thing is a slightly different story. Apple settled a case out of court for $95m where the accusation was that snippets of text around the "Hey Siri" wake word had been recorded on their servers and may have been listened to by employees (or contractors) who were debugging and improving Siri's performance: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-...

The problem with that lawsuit is that the original argument included anecdotal notes about "eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items". By settling, Apple gave even more fuel to those conspiracy theories.

I wrote about this a few months ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not... - including a note about that general conspiracy theory and how "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it."

... all of that said, I 100% agree with the general message of this article - the "truth is more disturbing" bit. Facebook can target you ads spookily well because they have a vast amount of data about you collected by correlating your activity across multiple sources. If they have your email address or phone number they can use that to match up your behaviour from all sorts of other sources. THAT's the creepy thing that people need to understand is happening.

"Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it."

It sounds more like we have evidence of what we believe, you think we should toss the evidence for your counter-theory, and people won't do that. We also have an effect where tons of people experienced this. You want us to toss that, too.

"You don’t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don’t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?"

On Facebook, during one period this happened, they were only showing me adds for Hotworx and a massage place every time. Trying to stay pure minded following Jesus Christ means I avoid such ads. So, it was strange that it's all they showed me. Then, strange the only break from the pattern was showing unlikely topics we just talked about in person.

So, I'm going to stick with the theory that they were listening since it best fit the evidence. I don't know why they'd do it. Prior reports long ago said they used to use ML (computer vision) to profile people outside of the platform who showed up in your pics.

I'll note another explanation. Instead of always listening, they could have done it to a random segment of people who were rarely clicking ads. Just occasionally, too. We wouldn't see the capability in use all the time. A feature tested or used on a subset of users.

Also, these companies keep saying on us in increasingly creative and dishonest ways. If anyone is to be blamed, it's them.